You can hardly open a newspaper these days or listen to a news broadcast without reading or hearing about global warming and climate change. Even PHYSICS REVIEW has been at it with articles on climate modelling and evidence for global warming. Much of the recent warming has been firmly associated with venting large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels. In an effort to avoid making the situation worse, scientists and engineers have been developing the use of alternative sources of energy. One of these is to use the power of the waves around our coast. Several schemes have been proposed for doing this, but I have never been convinced that any is capable of adding significantly to our electricity supply — until now.
The scheme that has fired my imagination is the Pelamis wave energy converter seen in Figure 1, which is now in an advanced state of development. A production prototype is installed in the sea near to Stromness in Orkney. Before looking at this in any detail, however, let us first explore the power of waves.
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